I’ve seen a bunch of my Instagram mutuals sharing mirror selfies with the iconic iPhone cover designed to hold a Rhode Skin lip tint. I’ve also seen carefully curated feeds featuring photos of strategically cluttered items, including Rhode Skin products. While I may not use the products myself, it’s very obvious how the brand has a hold on Gen Zs on social media.
In fact, Rhode Skin is one of the top six brands with the highest year-over-year growth in earned media value (EMV). It now boasts $212.1 million in EMV, which amounts to an increase of 367%.
All of this is a result of the brand’s community-first approach to driving social media engagement. This post serves as a blueprint to help you replicate the Rhode recipe for your own engagement efforts.
But first, why engage your community? I get that it’s fun and all, but what business benefits can you get from community engagement?
When your customers are engaged, they become strong advocates for your brand. A comment here and a repost there make them feel acknowledged and appreciated. So they’re more inclined to keep sharing their positive experiences or featuring your brand in their social media posts.
As your engaged community talks about your brand online, it brings you more visibility within their respective networks. Moreover, when they share your content or engage with it, it maximizes your reach and gets your brand in front of even more people. This contributes to sustainable organic growth that adds to your bottom line.
The feedback and conversation generated by an engaged community also provide valuable insights into your audience. From their preferences and pain points to their buying behaviors and current interests, there’s a lot of data you can glean to inform your decisions.
Being part of an engaged community gives customers a sense of belonging that makes them feel more connected to your brand. This connection is essential to building brand trust and ultimately turning customers into loyal fans.
For Rhode Skin, their entire social media engagement strategy relies on relatability as the main ingredient. The brand consistently posts content featuring the founder, helping to put a human face to the brand. So instead of engaging with a faceless brand, people are connecting with a real person.
And in spite of Hailey Bieber being a public figure, her minimalistic approach to style, skincare, and makeup feels relatable to her fans. As her lifestyle seamlessly blends the aspirational with the relatable, people (particularly Gen Z audiences) look up to her while resonating with her content.
Rhode Skin will often share videos or photos of the founder without her makeup, showing fans that she’s just like everyone else. She’ll either share her bedtime or morning routine or show how she creates her favorite summer makeup look.
Since the Rhode community is mostly made up of diehard Hailey Bieber fans, many channel her “aesthetic.” Some would say she pioneered the clean girl beauty trend that’s been taking over social media in the past few years. So they feel drawn to minimalism and relatability.
To connect with this community, the brand’s social feeds also channel the same “aesthetic” as the founder. It features Rhode Skin products in minimalistic settings and creators wearing little to no makeup except for the brand’s products.
Even when the brand reposts community-driven content, they curate looks with the same visual appeal that would resonate with the audience. So when people see these posts, they feel more drawn to the brand. It also helps to create a sense of belonging within a community of people who like the same things.
If we’re going to break it down, there’s nothing complicated or over-the-top about Rhode’s approach to social media engagement. Come to think of it, that’s likely why it works so well. Let me highlight the practical steps that Rhode Skin uses to nurture a strong community on social media.
Hailey Bieber isn’t just the founder of Rhode Skin. She is Rhode Skin. So having her create content is an effective way to directly connect the brand to its community.
In fact, her get-ready-with-me TikToks are the foundation for the brand’s social media strategy. They’re raw, unfiltered, and relatable, which strongly resonate with the audience. There’s no heavy pitching or hard selling, which can sometime push people away rather than win them over.
Instead, these videos show the founder with bare, makeup-free skin as she puts on her skincare and makeup so she can get ready to face the day. Some show her prepping her skin as she winds down for bed. She’s wearing regular clothes just like anyone else – no fancy gimmicks or professional lights. It’s almost as if you’re watching a friend doing her makeup in her bedroom.
This relatability and authenticity resonate with the audience, helping them feel connected to the founder and ultimately the brand.
Although Hailey’s GRWM TikTok videos are the backbone of Rhode’s social media engagement strategy, they’re not the only types of content filling up the brand’s feed. They’re also sharing skincare routines and makeup tips from creators using native TikTok formats and Instagram Reels.
The brand keeps things diversified with a bunch of influencer-generated content that features the brand’s products in one way or another. And just like Hailey Bieber’s videos, there’s no hard-selling or sales-y message involved. You can find influencers swatching the brand’s lip tints, getting ready for the day with the peptide eye prep on, or creating clean makeup looks with a combination of products.
These videos are often raw and unfiltered, matching the brand’s minimalist aesthetic. Some will even use footage that’s clearly not meant for mobile screens (read: landscape videos).
By sharing content that’s unpolished rather than heavily edited, the brand appears more approachable and relatable. So audiences feel more connected to the brand because it comes across as more authentic.
In addition, the content serves the brand’s community, making it resonate with them. It offers something valuable – whether it teaches them how to use a certain product, shows them what a certain shade looks like, or inspires them to try a new item. This type of content also helps to normalize product use as a part of everyday routines.
The Rhode community is led by influential creators who share a genuine love for the brand’s products. These creators help expand the brand’s reach within their respective networks, allowing them to grow their community organically.
Rhode Skin nurtures this creator community by actively engaging with them via DMs and social media comments. When creators – big and small – create content featuring Rhode products, the brand often comments on the posts and makes them feel acknowledged. Since the brand’s social media content strategy also relies on this creator community, the team also engages with them via DMs to get permission to reuse the content.
When you take the time to actively engage with your audience, it shows them that you’re listening. Whether you’re answering their questions or simply showing your appreciation for them, it helps you strengthen your connection with them. So they might be more excited about sharing new posts or engaging with your brand in the future.
On a related note, Rhode’s social media also relies heavily on user-generated content. From PR videos by influential creators to raw and unedited images by everyday customers, the brand regularly reuses content shared by the community.
This is particularly true for the Rhode lip case iPhone cover, as the brand shares images of regular people and influencers alike posing with the product. With Hailey Bieber starting the mirror selfie trend featuring the product, many social media users followed suit. The brand reposted the content to nurture a strong community.
Rhode also uses hashtags like #RhodeRoutine or #GetReadyWithRhode to keep track of user-generated content. These hashtags are great for building rituals and encouraging customers to share their own makeup looks and skincare routines.
Additionally, the brand regularly reposts influencer content, sometimes reusing it for other forms of marketing material. For instance, they used screen captures from creator videos to show how certain lip combinations look when applied.
Similarly, you could repost, Stitch, or Remix fan content. You could even create video replies to user comments – perfect for answering questions or addressing concerns.
This is a great way to engage the brand community, as you show your appreciation by publicly acknowledging their support. When people get recognition for their effort, they feel more enthusiastic about engaging with your brand. In other words, you’re incentivizing the community to keep engaging.
For others, it’s a way to show them, “Hey, look at all these people using our products. Why don’t you become part of our community?” It creates FOMO that makes them want to be a part of the community.
As I mentioned earlier, Rhode’s community responds to minimalism and relatability. Knowing this, the brand aligns their visual strategy to resonate with the audience.
That means no heavy filters, no excessive editing, and no overloaded elements. Whether it’s for branded content or creator-generated posts, the brand keeps visuals minimal and straightforward. The following promo photo for the snap-on lip case perfectly exudes the brand’s minimalist aesthetic, featuring a clean, black and white photo of Hailey Bieber using the product.
Even the community-led posts follow a similar pattern. Visuals are often raw, candid, and minimally edited. You can see creators doing something random while wearing the peptide eye prep, for instance. Candid poses and on-the-go videos perfectly capture the relatable vibe that the brand wants to exude to connect with the Rhode community.
An excited community is an engaged community. And Rhode knows this all too well. That’s why they lean into limited-edition drops to engage their fanbase in not only existing products but future releases.
Rhode is particularly known for their annual limited-edition Birthday Edit, which launches every November in honor of the founder’s birthday. They’ve built somewhat of a tradition that gets the community anticipating the year’s upcoming launch weeks before the actual drop. You can see users commenting on how much they look forward to the birthday drop several months ahead of time.
Rhode Skin further adds to the anticipation with teasers that showcase leading creators trying on the upcoming products. These creators received exclusive previews where they got to test the new items before they became publicly available. This sense of exclusivity engages the creator community to drum up excitement about the drop. And the content they create gets repurposed as teaser content to engage the rest of the brand community.
One thing that makes the Rhode community loyal to the brand is the feeling of being involved. The brand actually listens to their customers about what they want, which they then use to inform product development and drop decisions.
So they’ll launch products that customers have been demanding.
Or bring back community favorites. For instance, the brand relaunched customer-favorite lip tint shades that were originally launched as limited edition drops and added them to their permanent lineup.
While this is an effective community engagement strategy, it also benefits the brand by providing vital customer insights. It helps them gauge what the customer wants, allowing them to make informed, data-backed decisions. So they can keep coming back with products that have been proven to be a success with the community.
The result? No wasted product development costs. No need for expensive marketing stunts. Instead, you get pure, community-driven campaigns that inform everything – from which products to sell and how to promote it.
Driving and sustaining engagement on social media is all about community. Use “community before campaign” as your mantra, and you’ll never have to force them to engage. Engagement comes naturally when the brand is an active participant instead of just a presenter.